Summary of course taken

I went to Cardiff University and have just finished a BSc, in Psychology which took three years.  The main issue for me was the amount of reading we had to do this included journals and books and when I had to download PDF articles.  I found having to read quickly in a tutorial and taking notes worrying.  I also found that spell checking whilst writing disrupted my thoughts despite having a wide range of assistive technology.

Description of strategies used.

Everything that we had to read seemed to come in PDF  and so I used TextHelp Read and Write with the Adobe PDF to highlight and read the words outloud. This meant I could read and understand rather than having to reread, stop because I was tired and then have another go later.

When it came to books I used the OpticBook scanner to take in whole chapters that were then turned into PDFs using the optical character recognition software in TextHelp Read and Write Gold.

One of the real problems with secure PDFs is that you cannot use text to speech with them and you have to use a free program like PDF Creator or CutePDF to turn them into a tiff file that can then be virtually 'scan from file option' in TextHelp Read and Write Gold.

I also carry around a small reading ruler which has a blue plastic section within two grey sections to allow me to read text when I am out and about.  It stops rivers of text - white space seeming to appear between words within blocks of text.

When planning an essay I tend to make a mind map by hand, but if I have to give a presentation I use Inspiration because it has all the colour and graphics which makes it easier to read than a massive sheet of text.

I have real trouble when I write essays as my spelling distracts me from my flow of ideas so I developed a software program that I called Global AutoCorrect.  This allowed me to continue writing whilst it picked up my errors and corrected them.

Finally for organising my life I use Outlook synchronised with my mobile phone, making task reminders for everything with alarms.  People would joke as I would set up a task to remind me to text someone etc!